Cyber Range 101: A Dangerous Game?

Posted by Pascal Joly February 9, 2017

The "Super Bowl" of security

If it's not already the case, Cyber Security will be on top of everyone's mind next week at the Moscone in San Francisco. The RSA conference will gather thousands of IT security professionals from Monday to Thursday , and Quali will be there, joining IXIA on the Expo floor (Booth #3401) to Showcase our Cyber Range Cloud Sandbox solution and demo our integration with the industry leading Ixia Breaking Point traffic generator solution.

So what is a Cyber Range?

One of the fundamental rules to better fight back attacks is to be prepared. Simply said, a cyber range is an environment to simulate real-world cyber threat scenarios for training and development. Typically, the players will involve a red team simulating the hacker and a blue team responsible for defending the target application and stopping the attack. Not to forget the white team that will watch for the critical infrastructure components such as mail and DNS servers. Cyber Ranges can include infrastructure servers such as DNS and mail, application servers, firewalls, and a variety of tools like Traffic simulators and Intrusion Detection systems.

In a nutshell, a Cyber Range is an incredible tool for both hardening an infrastructure against potential attacks and training IT personnel on security best practices and mitigation strategies.

Limiting Factors

In practicality, cyber range effectiveness is held back by:

High complexity: environments consist of many components like switches,
servers, firewalls, specialized test gear, virtual resources, as well as tools, APIs,
and services.

Lack of visualization & modeling prevents easy access to and reliable
reuse of various security / threat environments and reporting.